Window-covering giant Hunter Douglas in a lawsuit accuses its longtime patent attorney of swindling nearly $5 million from the company over 14 years.

Jason Throne, 53, of Rockport, Maine, allegedly submitted — and approved — bogus bills for payment to a Colorado shell company he and his wife secretly controlled, according to the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court.

Since 2000, Throne and his wife, Mary, have pocketed roughly $40,000 a month, using the money to build luxury homes in Steamboat Springs and in Maine, the lawsuit alleges.

No one caught on to the ruse until an employee at Hunter Douglas Window Fashions in Broomfield questioned the expenses.

Mary Throne incorporated Patent Services Group in 1999, using their address in Steamboat Springs as its registered address, according to corporation records filed with the Colorado sectary of state’s office. The company was administratively dissolved in late 2002, records show.

But that didn’t stop Jason Throne from continuing to submit bills, masking the family’s ownership by way of a bogus fax number in Colorado, the lawsuit alleges.

Hunter Douglas, based in Pearl River, N.Y., said it fired Throne on June 12 after confronting him about the bills, which the company said he admitted submitting. The window fashions division in Colorado is a wholly owned subsidiary.

The Thrones did not return telephone messages left at their home in Maine. The attorney for Jason Throne refused to comment.

The bills provided no detail about Patent Services Group’s work for Throne — or its connection to him — but the company purportedly did routine patent searches for Hunter Douglas, a normal part of Throne’s duties.

Hunter Douglas said in the lawsuit that Mary Throne has no experience in patent issues, noting that her only job had been as an aquatic aerobics instructor.

Jason Throne had signed the company’s ethics policy against conflicts of interest and also certified he had no outside employment, records filed with the lawsuit show.

Like many companies, Hunter Douglas owns several patents on its products, including for venetian-blind construction going back decades. Part of its process is to check filings at the U.S. Patent Office — now in Denver — to ensure an idea is patentable.

Throne allegedly approved bills from PSG for payment that indicated they had been faxed from a Colorado telephone number to Throne’s home in Maine, the lawsuit says.

Throne then sent the approved bills to Hunter Douglas’ accounting department for payment — intentionally bypassing a computer system that regularly audited such expenses — and routinely traveled to pick up the checks that were mailed to a Boulder post office box, the lawsuit says.

The checks were deposited into a bank in Steamboat Springs, where the Thrones owned a 35-acre spread and built — then sold — a $1.1 million home, documents filed with the lawsuit show.

The company said the bills, if true, would have translated to up to 12 hours of nonstop work daily.

The billing became even more brazen as the years went by, starting at $125 per hour, eventually jumping to more than $300 an hour. In 2013, Patent Services Group was paid nearly a half-million dollars, the lawsuit shows.

The scheme began to unravel in late 2013 when an employee in the company’s intellectual property office questioned PSG’s “astronomical charges,” saying she’d never heard of the company before.

As head of that division, Throne managed to cover up the problem by saying the bills were legitimate and that he used the company for “state of the art searches” and that the work “cuts across all of our businesses.”

David Migoya: 303-954-1506, dmigoya@denverpost.com or twitter.com/davidmigoya

David is a member of the Investigations Team and has been at The Denver Post since 1999. He was a founding member of the team before moving on to cover banking, finance, human services, consumer affairs, and business investigations. He has also worked at newspapers in New York, St. Louis and Detroit over a 35-year career.